“Recruiting Manager”

BY JAY SOO-HAN

She was a recruiting manager at Aerotek and a 23-year-old single mother of two toddlers. She had to balance a full-time job and a young family, and this is her story.

I have a job as a recruiting manager at Aerotek. After being rejected from my previous job, I interned at similar jobs to build up my rapport with the company. I realized I couldn’t keep doing this job for free, as I had two toddlers and I had recently divorced their dad, who was still refusing to pay even a dime of child support, so I reapplied and got a paid position.

When I got hired at Aerotek, I was one of the very few women in the office, the only one of color, and the only mother in the whole office. The women in the office, including myself, were typically harassed. Some played into the harassment and would show off while I would just do my best to ignore it and get through the day’s work. I would often be misunderstood for needing to pick up my kids to take them to daycare or pick them up when they got sick, or even when I had to take whole sick days to care for them. While there were dads in the office, they didn’t need to leave to pick up or care for their sick kids because they had wives who were expected to do that. Most people didn’t even take sick days and would show up to work ill. This is what was expected of everyone — because it is what was expected of men.

I worked to provide for my kids and to strive toward a better future for our family. I had to pay $200 a week for daycare alone. Plus, I needed to feed them, drive them to daycare, and even have extra money for fun things like taking them to Chuck E. Cheese so that their only memories of me as young children wouldn’t be me being overworked and tired. Everything I did was for our family, and the contradictory needs of my job versus my kids made that really difficult, yet I pulled it off for my family.